Shane stood up while he was reading the last item on the agenda. Busy shutting off the tablet, he didn’t see my head jerk back as I looked up from my computer. “Oxford University? What the fuck do they want with me?”
My friend’s gaze snapped back to mine, seemingly uncertain about whether to worry or if I was just fucking with him. “They want to discuss the final details about your new intern?”
“Intern?” I frowned at Shane, racking my brain for what he could possibly be talking about. “What do you mean, intern?”
“We spoke about this in September,” he said, groaning and tilting his head back. “Please, please tell me you haven’t forgotten.”
“I haven’t forgotten. You’ll just need to remind me. September was six months ago. What. Fucking. Intern?”
He sighed and took a seat again. “Oxford is sending their top student in their doctoral program to us for the semester. She’ll work at the firm as an intern and you will mentor her.”
Ah, fuck. The whole intern thing rang a bell now. “Her?”
“Yes.” Shane narrowed his eyes at me in suspicion.
I arched an eyebrow, moving my gaze back to my computer. Perhaps there was an email on there about this intern. If it was a her, that would certainly make things more interesting. “Where’s she from?”
“She’s American,” Shane said, the corners of his lips rising in a smile.
“Oh, well, that’s just great,” I grumbled. “That’s just what I need right now. A well to-do cocky American woman with—”
“You’re making a lot of assumptions.” He held up his hands and suppressed his smile. “And who are you to reprimand someone for being cocky anyway?”
“I’m the boss,” I reminded him. “I’m allowed to be cocky.”
Shane chuckled but gave me a look I knew meant business. “Just be nice when she gets here, all right? It’s a good program. And the PR will be—”
“I get it,” I said. “It’ll help my reputation.”
“Exactly.” He switched the tablet back on. “I’ll send you the information Oxford’s sent to me. She’s supposed to be really smart. The university only sends their students to a certain number of people for these mentorship opportunities. There’s also only one top student, and she’s coming here. It’s huge for them to have chosen you for this, Jude. Don’t fuck it up.”
“I won’t.” A smirk curved on my lips as I cocked my head. “I assume that means I can’t have sex with her?”
“Jude,” he warned.
“Just asking.” I smiled like an innocent little flower, wondering what this intern looked like. Fucking her might not look good for my reputation, but that was only if anyone found out.
If they didn’t? Well, then I’d have no problem.
It was definitely worth keeping in mind—even if Americans weren’t exactly my favorite bunch to be around.
Shane was right, though. I could handle a little cockiness.
As long as she could handle mine.
Chapter 5
ROSE
Three hours into my flight and I had only scribbled down one note so far.
Jude Hudson is a bastard billionaire alpha male with a big ego and a devil may care attitude.
It didn’t exactly endear him to me, but after having flipped through more than half of a biography written on him while on the plane, it was the only conclusion that had definitively jumped out at me.
I rested my head back against the seat and closed my eyes, letting the Indie-pop music flowing through my earphones calm my racing heart. There were approximately seventeen hours left before this flying tube hurtling me toward the other side of the world touched down.
In that time, I had to come up with a game plan. If the biography about him was at all accurate, and I suspected it was, Jude and I were not going to get along.
The book had only been written at the end of last year, so the information in it was only about four months old, meaning it wasn’t some outdated research about a man who had changed his ways in the meantime.
A soft sigh left me as I thumbed the pages of the paperback I’d picked up at duty-free. Books had always had a way of calming me. Just holding one in my hands was usually enough to ground me but not this time.
It was like the subject of this book had somehow electrified the paper the words were written on and I received tiny jolts of that electricity just by touching the pages. Sighing as I opened my eyes, I used my finger to mark my place and turned the book over to read the excerpt on the back again.
Jude Hudson skyrocketed to fame after he developed two mobile applications that have gained global popularity. Hudson Technologies has since rocked our world numerous times, and its founder is more prominent now than ever before.
His business savvy and somewhat ruthless approach have made him into an international sensation. It’s not uncommon for his face to be plastered on the covers of magazines or for him to appear on talk shows.
We got to sit down with the man himself and got to know him like you’ve never seen him before. Whether you want to learn about Jude, learn the lessons he lives his life by, or get a never-before-seen look inside the mind that created Australia’s favorite tech company, this is the book for you.
I had to admit that so far, I didn’t feel like I’d gotten inside his mind at all. In fact, there seemed to be very little information about his thoughts or his so-called business savvy.
The book presented him as the stereotypical cool-cat bachelor. There were tons of pictures, but in all of them, he looked like an asshole with a chip the size of the city he lived in on his shoulder.
Seriously.
He wore flashy watches and seemed to have more of them than I had pairs of underwear. They were all large, gaudy timepieces that he seemed to have purchased to have one in each precious metal.
The glossy photo page the book was opened to right then was just a picture of his hands and wrists. It looked like he’d been posed to sit on a couch with his fingers entwined, and the photographer had made a point of capturing the ostentatious golden monstrosity sitting on Jude’s thick wrist.
The man had nice hands. I had to give him that. Long, tanned fingers with just a hint of that tattoo creeping out from below his sleeve made for a pretty cool picture.
But that was beside the point.
If it was supposed to be a book about the man behind the playboy image of a self-indulgent billionaire, it fell miserably short. Aside from the flashy watches, it also spoke to a nauseating extent about a man who seemed to live for charming beautiful women and driving luxury sports cars.
Picture after picture had been included of him with his arm around women who had smiles as confident as his. Often, these showed Jude and his companion entering or exiting a nightclub.
The dude seemed to live like an A-list celebrity instead of a techie business mogul. He really came off the page like a fictional character more than a real person. It was impossible to believe I’d be meeting him before the end of the week. Knowing that I would be working alongside him for the next six months seemed laughable.
But it was true.
I was going to be working alongside him, so I had to get a grip on myself. Anna had thought I was crazy for complaining about working with him, but I was still wondering if I was in for a semester of torture or not.